Before we start, I wanted to remind you that I’ll be in the hospital today and for the next few days due to surgery. I’d appreciate it if the regular blog readers could help by answering the questions in my absence. Edith will also help answer questions.

You guys have been very good to me this year, which is why I didn’t mind putting in the extra time with this gun. Too much.

In all my years of shooting pellet rifles, I’ve never worked harder to get a good result. The Tech Force 87 underlever has the potential to shoot pellet after pellet through the same hole, but only if you know what you’re doing and you never deviate from the right procedure. If you are a casual deer hunter, better stand inside a barn and be satisfied when you hit one of the walls. But if you can be an anal jedi/ninja sort of guy, you can get this rifle to perform.

Well, we’ve certainly heard a lot of passionate comments about the new Marlin Cowboy from the Part 1 report! Today, we’ll test velocity, and I’m including the new RWS BBs in this test. You can’t buy these from Pyramyd Air as of this date, but perhaps if they test out well in a couple guns we’ll give them a reason to stock them.

Somebody commented that the Cowboy looks like theDaisy Red Ryder, but I don’t think it does. In fact, there’s very little resemblance between these two BB guns, other than the fact that they both have levers. The Marlin is a little larger, overall, and perhaps not as refined as the Red Ryder.

Before we begin I have a word about my health. Next Tuesday I’m going to have my pancreas repaired. This is hopefully the final operation I will have to undergo. It will be a major operation where they open me up rather than going in laprascopically, so I’ll be in the hospital for a week or possibly longer to recover. I have written blogs to cover the time I’ll be away, plus I’ll probably have my laptop at the hospital, but I may not be as easy to reach next week. If everything goes according to plan, I should get the drain out of my side and the stent out of my pancreas by the end of this year. And, while I’m away, I’d like to ask the veteran readers to help out the new guys, as you always do.

Today is accuracy day! Finally we’ll get to see what this special lower-velocity version of the .22 caliber Crosman TitanGP Nitro Piston can do downrange. First, I’ll address the scope since so many people have commented on it.

The 4×32 CenterPoint Optics scope that comes with the rifle is not adjusted for parallax at close range. When I aimed at the targets 25 yards away, they were slightly out of focus, even at only 4x. That can really drive you nuts, so I have to agree with those who have said you should think about replacing the scope. That being said, however, I don’t think it had a great influence on the outcome of this test. The low magnification probably affected my aim more than the slight focus issue.

Well, today’s the special fourth report that I promised you. Last time, I said I wanted to try the pistol with hunting pellets on maximum power because of the showing I got with Beeman Kodiaks on three pumps. That’s what today is all about.

Again, I’ll tell you that these are 5-shot groups simply because the Alecto is so darned hard to pump 3 times. Ten-shot groups would have worn me out.

The trigger is the biggest drawback to this pistol. It’s a single-stage pull that doesn’t work for accurate shooting. The stage is heavy, long and creepy with an indistinct release. If the pistol had a better trigger, I think I could have done better with it. It needs a nice crisp two-stage trigger.

Over the years I have written about many strange airguns. Some of them were mine and others were guns I either borrowed to test or just wrote about.

Sometimes, I’ve even written about firearms, which a student of airguns should understand because of the insight firearms shed on our hobby. Microgroove rifling, for instance, came from a 19th century barrelmaker named Harry Pope. Then, the Marlin company copied it; and only after airguns began being rifled in about 1906 was microgroove rifling finally applied to them.

And, there have been a fair number of curious guns that don’t really fit exactly in one category. For example, the Kruger cap-firing BB pistol isn’t really an airgun, but a firearm by the definition that a firearm discharges one or more projectiles by the force of a chemical explosion. But no BATF&E agent would ever give one a second look. Made mostly of black styrene, the Kruger is a toy by anyone’s definition. You can read about it in this report.

Okay, today I’m going to shoot the Crosman TitanGP with Nitro Piston through the chronograph. Boy, did we have a lot of discussion about this rifle in Part 1, and a lot of folks surprised when they realized that I was talking about an entirely different air rifle than the one they were commenting on. I tried to explain in the report that this is a very different rifle, but quite a few shooters were confused by the more powerful rifle that goes by the same name.

Crosman Corporation, are you reading this? People don’t like it when you name two different guns the same, any more than you would like it if they referred to a Crosman Pumpmaster 760 as a Red Ryder. You drove airgun collectors crazy when you named a Chinese spring piston rifle the Benjamin Super Streak, but in light of the whole Benjamin Sheridan brand name mix, I guess that’s water under the bridge. The point is that different airguns need different names so people can refer to them without getting confused.